Andrews Labor Government must stop selective and misleading reporting of firefighting response times.

Mr WELLS (Rowville) (15:58:18) — This statement condemns the Andrews Labor government for its selective and misleading reporting of firefighting response times. Labor’s release of data is not about transparency but is a malicious attack on the service delivery model of the Country Fire Authority (CFA), directed at undermining the efforts of our hardworking CFA firefighters. The government is deeply critical of the CFA response times, while holding the CFA to vastly different standards from the Metropolitan Fire Brigade (MFB). Each CFA brigade is examined right down to the number and percentage of incidents where the brigade attends within the expected service delivery standards. There are statistics for significant urban areas, urban areas and rural areas, and maps of the aggregates of these statistics.

The Premier has cherry-picked which statistics to release, scrutinising the CFA brigade by brigade, while ignoring that CFA brigades are dispatched by 000 to work side-by-side with neighbouring brigades and neighbouring MFB stations. The CFA website states that 000 usually dispatches two brigades to provide immediate assistance, yet these CFA brigade area statistics do not include any of the times where a CFA brigade responds to incidents in neighbouring brigade areas. We do not even know how many times this occurs. In my own electorate, the Rowville and Scoresby CFA brigades often attend road accidents, chemical spills and other incidents on major roads. Emergency medical callouts are not counted in these statistics either. This data is a complete smokescreen by the Premier.